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A documentary in the continuing Up series about the lives of 13 Britons. Directed by Michael Apted. 144 minutes. Opens Dec. 21 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. PG

As inevitable as death, taxes and weak tea on British Rail, Michael Apted’s Up series of life chronicles returns with its latest seven-year assessment of 13 well-scrutinized lives.

The good news about 56 Up: all 13 participants are all still alive and mostly content with that simple fact.

The bad news: what they’re doing isn’t all that interesting, especially in this Internet age when all the world’s a stage. Much more colourful characters are just a mouse click away on YouTube.

More than ever in this seventh edition, the Up people seem to be fulfilling Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

This is not to fault director Apted, who has shown true British pluck and resourcefulness in continuing with a project that began in 1964 as an experiment in class differences, environment and destiny. Seven Up!, a 40-minute film made for British TV, studied children from rich and poor backgrounds, who have been followed at seven-year intervals ever since.

Apted was a young researcher for the original film, which was directed by Canada’s Paul Almond, and Apted took over the reins for all subsequent chapters, now swollen to epic movie length.

He has followed his charges through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, watching as they have entered and left school, got married and divorced, had children, won or lost jobs and generally gotten on with things. A few have dropped out and returned; only one original participant, Charles Furneaux, has left the series for good.

So we return once again to people such as Sue Davis, first viewed in 1964 as a happy London girl with modest life ambitions, who like most of her series fellows made out modestly well. Married at 24, divorced at 35 with a couple of kids, at age 56 she now runs the post-graduate law program at Queen Mary College in London. She’s been “engaged” for 14 years to her boyfriend Glenn. She’s trying her hand at amateur theatre.

On it goes with the others, variations on a similar theme, with no definitive proof that people from more affluent families make out better than those from poorer ones — which may just prove the original point of the series.

One exception to the parade of blandness is Liverpudlian Neil Hughes, the lost soul of the Up brigade. Fighting mental illness since his teen years, he’s struggled through ups and downs that left him homeless at 28 and still restless at 56.

Hughes is now an elected councillor in a small village, worrying about things such as repairing the public toilet. He laments how “I do feel nobody is listening out there.” Never married, no children (he predicted at age 7 he’d never have them), he says he’d be happy to pop off by age 70 or so. He’s fortunate for one thing: had this show debuted in the era of reality TV, he’d have been crucified on the Internet.

Apted makes for a curious and patient inquisitor, as always, and you have to give the man all due respect for creating a unique work that will likely never again be equaled in anyone’s lifetime. The Up series is a valuable contribution to social research.

Still, you can’t but wish that he’d picked more interesting kids to follow (he has regretted the preponderance of males), and also that he’d dig a little deeper into the lives of the people he’s following.

At this point I should mention that I am 56, too, and for most of my life I have followed these characters with reactions ranging from curiosity to concern to impatience. This is starting to turn to some small variation of horror as we all now head towards the inevitable 63 Up.

So I may be biased, but my sentiments are also expressed by Suzy Lusk, one of the toffs of the series, now a bereavement counselor with a husband and three children. She complains on camera that “you don’t get a very rounded picture” of people from the Up series. It’s a point shared by her fellow participant Nick Hitchon, a Yorkshire who has lived in both the U.S. and the U.K. and is now remarried with an American wife.

Bully for Apted that he allows dissent like this, but he’s not inclined to explore it or to address it in any fashion. And didn’t Suzy return, after vowing in 49 Up that she’d had it with this series?

They all seem inclined to live up to the slogan of a popular poster, the one that shows a British crown and the message, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It’s in This Is 40, the Judd Apatow life comedy that just opened, and I think I also spotted it in 56 Up.

Although for this series the slogan should probably be, “Keep Up and Carry On.” See you all for (gulp) 63 Up.

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